PanCareSurPass session at Hospitals on FHIR 2024

Hospitals on FHIR is a unique initiative of HL7 Europe to convene a Community of Practice aimed at boosting interoperability maturity in healthcare organisations and awareness in the clinical community. At its annual meeting, the Hospitals on FHIR User Days in Brussels on 24 November 2024, PanCareSurPass organised a panel session to present the project, seek feedback, and to engage with this community, and four of the PanCareSurPass clinical sites participated:

• Riccardo Haupt (Gaslini) presented the project and reflected on the implementation in Italy.
• Justas Trinkunas and Paulius Ragauskas shared learnings from VULSK.
• Edit Bardi from St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute shared how the PanCareSurPass deployment fits into the wider Austrian infrastructure.
• Alexandre Siau discussed lessons learned from the KU Leuven/University Hospital Leuven (Belgium).
• Finally, Roberta Gazzarata from HL7 Europe gave a status update of the PanCareSurPass Project HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide.

The session was hosted and facilitated by Michael Strübin from HL7 Europe. All slides are available here.

There was significant interest from the audience despite the late afternoon schedule. Questions and discussions centred around technical issues (how did the clinical sites manage the transition from proprietary/legacy to FHIR formats?), regulatory issues (how will PanCareSurPass comply and interact with the European Health Data Space?), the project lifecycle (how will clinical sites carry the passport forward once the PanCareSurPass project ends?), and how the follow-up form could be implemented and organized allowing interactions with healthcare professionals, as well collection of epidemiologic data on chronic conditions among survivors. We closed with a consensus that the main barriers for cross border data transfers are not technical: they are legal.